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Sunday, November 18, 2012

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?How long will you hide your face from me?How long must I take counsel in my souland have sorrow in my heart all the day?How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Psalm 13:1-2

I know that after World War II, the Jews needed a safe haven, a place where they could live proudly as Jews.I know that Golda Meir lied when she called Palestine a land without a people for a people without a land. There were people living there, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians -- Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who had lived side by side for generations upon generations.I know that European Jews, like the Russian Jews before them, had their homes and their businesses seized, never to get them back.I know that Palestinians have had -- and continue to have -- their homes and villages demolished, their farms, orchards, and olive groves seized, never to get them back.I know that the Jews were forced to live in ghettos, in squalor and poverty and fear.I know that the Palestinians have been forced to live in refugee camps, in squalor and poverty and fear.I know that the Nazis treated the Jews as lower than animals, rounding them up and subjecting them to unimaginable horror.I know that a revered Israeli general gloated that the Palestinians were "trapped like so many cockroaches" in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as he orchestrated their massacre. I know that 6 million Jews -- along with 11 million others (Catholics, Orthodox, Jehovah's Witnesses, Romany, Soviet POWs, mentally ill, physically and mentally disabled, deaf, homosexuals, intelligentsia ... ) -- were slaughtered during the Holocaust.I know that God weeps for every soul that has died this last week -- that God has been weeping for generations for every Jew, Muslim, and Christian who has died at one another's hands.How long, Lord, how long? When will your children learn?